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Saturday, March 26, 2016

Missing link in women’s rights

Yakin Erturk

The continuation of the war on women
in an escalated and violent fashion in many parts of the world has provoked me
to write a book reflecting on my human rights monitoring experiences of the
past two decades. One of the central challenges of the book, Violence Without
Borders, has been to unpack the hierarchy of rights that deny women access to
critical resources so needed in enhancing their capacity to resist
transgressions on their rights. This article stems from a chapter of the book
which argues that introducing a feminist political economy approach into the
analysis can unravel the missing link in women’s human rights.

The problem

The recognition of violence against women (VAW) as a human rights violation was
a turning point in the human rights movement. The 1993 Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women affirmed that ‘…violence against women is
a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women,
which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and…
violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women
are forced into a subordinate position….’

Since the adoption of the declaration, violence against women rose to
prominence on national and international agendas at the expense of compromising
its feminist content as the responses to the problem became dominated by a welfare
oriented approach. Thus VAW is treated in a selective, compartmentalised and
isolated manner, largely disconnected from gender inequality and women’s
socio-economic rights, which impedes their capability to escape violence.

Although Article 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights urges states to ensure women’s enjoyment of their economic and
social rights, governments have failed to adopt measures to enhance women’s
empowerment and access to productive resources. The detachment of VAW within
the human rights movement from the broader struggles for social and economic
equality, eradication of poverty and unemployment, livelihood security etc,
reduced women’s human rights issues to one of ‘protection’ and women into victims
in need of being saved.

Feminist economists’ and women’s rights advocates for long have emphasised the
importance of women’s economic autonomy and called for integrating a gender
perspective into macro-economic policies. This has become particularly urgent
under neo-liberalism and the international financial crisis. The likely adverse
impact of the crisis on women’s employment, livelihood security, the
realisation of the full range of their rights, including the potential for
increase in violence against them as well as on the achievement of the
Millennium Development Goals to slash poverty, hunger, infant and maternal
mortality, and illiteracy by 2015, has occupied the debates.

The exposure of socio-economic rights as the missing link within the women’s human
rights movement made integration of a political economy perspective into the
feminist approach to women’s right compelling. Political economy offers a
materialist understanding of society that reveals the interconnections among
the economic, political, and cultural/ideological spheres and incorporates
race, class, and culture into feminist analysis. Such an analysis; (i) goes
beyond mere distributional aspects of access to economic and social rights;
(ii) identifies discriminatory policies, practices and entitlement structures
that determine the gendered manifestations of these rights; and (iii) draws
attention to the feminist critique of the hierarchy of rights resulting from
the differential treatment of ‘first generation’ and ‘second generation’ rights,
ie the twin covenants.

The assumption that violation of rights, poverty, and exploitation is not
random, but embedded in structural inequalities, is the central principle of
the feminist political economy perspective.

Unravelling structural hierarchies

Power operates not only through coercion but also through the structured
relations of production and reproduction that govern the distribution and use
of resources, benefits, privileges and authority in the home and the society at
large. Identifying how the institutional and ideological formations of society
shape gender identities and statuses and where the boundaries of rights and
freedoms are drawn provides viable entry points for altering and re-configuring
these structures towards achieving equality.

Applying a political economy approach to women’s rights has been particularly
useful in unravelling three interrelated structural factors that underlie
women’s subordination and heighten the risk of violence against them.

The first factor is sexual-division of labour within public and private
spheres, with corresponding patriarchal gender ideologies. Within this context,
women are held primarily responsible for unremunerated and often invisible work
in the household, thus undermining their bargaining power vis-à-vis men and
other women acting on behalf of male power. Similarly, care related work in the
labour market, where women are concentrated, is also devalued. Globalisation
has extended sexual-division of labour to the transnational realm and as women
from developing countries migrated to provide care services for families in
wealthier countries reproductive work became internationalised.

The strict division of roles in the domestic sphere constrains women’s public
sphere participation and limits the economic opportunities in domestic or
transnational markets, thus entrapping many women into potentially abusive and
violent environments.

The second structural factor concerns neo-liberal market forces. In the
contemporary global era, capitalist competition has fuelled the demand for
cheap, flexible and unregulated labour to maximise profits locally and
transnationally. Within this context, the relocation of industries to the
periphery disrupted, at times destroyed, local economies and unleashed a
‘free-floating labour-force’ in search for alternative sources of livelihood.
Markets, intersecting with gender hierarchies in developing countries
encountered dislocated young women and drew them into wage employment in export
processing zones or in the care/service sectors of global cities on a scale
unseen before.

This phenomenon, often referred to as ‘feminisation of migration’ and
‘feminisation of labour-force’, had contradictory consequences for women. While
women became empowered by gaining independence and autonomy from the family,
due to the volatile nature of work conditions new vulnerabilities and risks
confronted them. At the same time, women’s integration into the labour market,
more often than not, destabilised the patriarchal family and created a crisis in
masculinity, increasing the risk of domestic violence.

Neo-liberal policies also created an enforcement gap in both property rights
and labour contracts as state capacity to regulate the labour market and to tax
profits eroded. Lack of enforcement coupled with the withdrawal of the state
from social services created a vacuum in human security at large. Unskilled and
marginalised women, who lack access to resources and basic capabilities, became
particularly burdened and poverty stricken.

Community based enforcement and support mechanisms were quick to respond to the
vacuum left from the withering away of the welfare state, thus strengthening
communal/tribalising tendencies and allowing non-state actors to seize the
opportunity for legitimate representation of identity politics as well as
monopolising service provision to impoverished groups. These trends have
reinforced the culture/religion-based discourses that challenge the
universality of human rights norms and reject women’s claims for rights and
equality.

The third structural factor is related to the gendered dimensions of war, peace
and security, which are intimately connected to patriarchy and the neo-liberal
global economy. Violent conflicts, often arising from contestation over
land, resources and power are indicative of shifts in hegemonic relations
locally as well as globally. When warfare strikes, VAW by state and non-state
actors, perpetuated with impunity, becomes heightened, generalised and the
norm. Sexual violence as a weapon of war became a salient feature of recent
conflicts.

Women alone, no doubt, bear the burden of war, which is often indiscriminate of
sex, age, colour or creed. However, it is the systematic, patterned and odious
ways, in which they are targeted, both within the community and by the ‘enemy’
side, is what makes their case in need of scrutiny.

Values that motivate war do not necessarily preclude women as soldiers, just as
the fact that the ‘motherhood’ motive does not rule out war-prone acts. Women
are known to have chosen to take up arms for various reasons, including
protecting their children and themselves.

Conflict and war and the security agendas impose trade-offs between military
spending and spending for development and human rights protection, particularly
that of women. In the post-conflict phase investment in reconstruction projects
are prioritised over human security concerns and may involve privatisation of
public services and infrastructure that often threatens household survival and
places greater burden on women’s labour.

A political economy analysis unveils the intimate link between peace and
justice; peace without justice is not sustainable. The prioritisation of
national security and electoral machinery by governments over human security in
many post-conflict situations has proven to be destabilising in the long run.
When women are excluded from access justice, physical security and
socio-economic rights, the distinction of war and peace may not be all that
meaningful. The war on women transcends conventional notions of war and
peace.

Hierarchy of rights

The preferential treatment of civil and political rights (ICCPR) over economic,
social and cultural rights (ICESCR), stands as a major constraint to
transforming the conditions that underlie gender inequality and VAW. The
Committee on ICESCR noted at the 1993 Vienna Conference that, ‘…states and
international community as a whole continue to tolerate all too often breaches
of economic, social, and cultural rights, which, if they occurred in relation
to civil and political rights, would provoke expression of horror and outrage
and would lead to concerted calls for immediate remedial action’.

States continue to perceive civil and political rights as ‘obligatory’ and
economic and social rights largely as ‘aspirational’. It is assumed that the
latter can only be progressively realised depending on the resources available
to a country, where as the former rights must be guaranteed immediately without
compromise. Critics have argued that progressive realisation also applies to
civil and political rights as both Covenants impose positive duties on
governments in their effort to comply with their obligations without
discrimination. Budgetary implications of the implementation of human rights
norms cannot excuse a state of non-discriminatory compliance with its
obligation to improve the socio-economic conditions of people within its
jurisdiction, or to adopt macro-economic policies that might undermine the
requirements of the ICESCR.

Shared responsibility for women’s human
rights

Despite these human rights obligations, states in responding to violence
against women have tended to focus more on reforming juridical and legal
structures, and less on altering economic and social structures. Combating VAW
and ensuring women’s human rights imposes a positive obligation on states to
effectively comply with their obligations under the twin covenants. In the
context of global restructuring and financial crises, economic and social
rights are particularly crucial – not only to women’s enjoyment of their
rights, but also for preventing the deepening of gender disparities.

While patterns of economic destabilisation associated with neo-liberal economic
policies that facilitate the integration of global markets have varied from
country to country, inequalities and vulnerabilities for women, including
opportunities for their access to paid work have shown similar cross-country
trends. Gender inequality, unequal entitlement structures, economic
insecurities of global capitalism, as well as weakening state capacity for
regulation and distributional justice have to a large extent determined how
women experienced globalisation. Poor women who are systematically denied
access to economic social rights are particularly at risk of greater hardship
and abuse.

It is important to note here that
globalisation has increased the role of corporate power over macro-economic
processes. This calls for expanding the concept of positive obligation to
include these transnational non-state entities. Sovereignty in the new global
order must be understood as shared responsibility of states, the international
community and non-state actors alike. The promotion and protection of a
holistic view of women’s human rights must be pursued transnationally.

OpenDemocracy.net, March 6. Yakin Erturk’s forthcoming book, Violence
Without Borders: the Paradigm, Policy and Practical Aspects of Violence against
Women, will be published in April 2015 (Istanbul: Metis Publishers)